From my recollections of my two brief times previously in Amsterdam, the center of the city is crowded, touristy, and quite rowdy late at night because of the Red Light District and other entertainment venues. That's not the atmosphere I was seeking, so I chose a hostel slightly farther out from the center very near the Museum Quarter, The Van Gogh Hostel. That makes some sense since being convenient to museums is a priority for me in Amsterdam while being close to prostitutes and pot-oriented establishments is not.

Amsterdam is a city with a multitude of museums, some more significant than others . Despite the fact that I can get into most for no additional cost having made a great investment in a Museum Card for 60 Euros that get me into almost all the museums in the country for free and enables me to skip the lines to buy tickets. Amsterdam’s three big art museums are the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum (modern and contemporary art), and the Rijksmuseum (of course), all grouped together around the Museumplein, a large park just beyond the city’s Grachtengortel (Canal Ring).

Vincent Van Gogh ranks up there with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and only a few other artists as a favorite of present-day art museum aficionados. There’s something about the themes of the impressionists as well as their bright color palettes that people in the modern era especially relate to even if they may agree that other painters of earlier eras displayed even greater mastery of technique.

Van Gogh’s rather short and tragic life are such that his paintings are both very sought after and relatively scarce, he having been nowhere as prolific as many of the other well-known impressionists . The Van Gogh Museum contains the largest collection of his paintings and drawing and consists of his works that remained in the family, essentially those he sent to his brother Theo that his (Theo’s) widow and children held onto. The Van Gogh Museum opened in the early 1970s and has since added another wing for additional space and temporary exhibitions.

With Van Gogh being so popular around the world, you can imagine how popular the largest collection of his works is. And it’s not really that big a museum, either. By 9:00 A.M. when the museum opened a large crowd that hadn’t obtained tickets earlier was already lined up. With my museum card, though, I was able to head straight into the place and briefly had a few rooms almost to myself before the tour group hordes arrived and more with timed-tickets started crowding in. I even managed to take a few pictures before a guard informed me photography wasn’t permitted except in a few designated areas in front of oversized reproductions. That’s probably a pretty good thing, especially since it’s so popular among East Asian tourists to all have their picture taken in front of famous works of art in museums, usually making a V-sign with their fingers . I managed to squeeze my way into the crowd for my own picture in front of an oversized self-portrait image of the master.

Somewhere in a box in my library in a my storage unit near Denver I have an art book of Van Gogh’s complete works that I probably read about five years ago, so I still vaguely recall Van Gogh’s life story and the various places he lived and painted, and the stylistic phases he went through, so it was very impressive to see so many of his paintings in one place where it was possible to follow that life. The museum also contains many paintings by Van Gogh’s friends and contemporaries who influenced him or were influenced by him. The museum is well worth visiting even if it’s impossible to escape the crowds.

The Stedelijk Museum stands next door to the Van Gogh, a stately old building in a kind of neo-Renaissance style to which a modern side which looks like a giant bathtub with a glass side has been added. The Stedelijk is considered to have one of the world’s largest collections of modern art, namely that from the latter part of the 1800s to the present, one so large that it can only display a small part at any given time so rotates exhibitions from its permanent collection as well as exhibitions of contemporary art, film, and photography . I have to admit that it took me a long time to develop much of an appreciation for "modern" art, and much of the avant-garde contemporary stuff that gets exhibited in many museums I hardly call art. For me those are just quick walk-through galleries, but others contemplate the most abstract and talent-free works the way I look at the fantastical paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Anyway, in my view “good” modern art includes impression, post-impressionism, expressionism, social realism, cubism, surrealism, and many other movements. I can even appreciate some pop art and abstract works, so there was a lot on display in Stedelijk’s current exhibitions that intrigued me. One of those was “100 Years of De Stijl”, an exhibition on Modriaan, Van Doesburg, Rietveld and affiliated artists that are considered pioneers of modern Dutch art and design. Of course, anything I took a picture of and have here is likely to not be on display in a few months as art works from the permanent collection get rotated in and out of view in various changing exhibitions.